Category: Fashion

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Mary Gallagher is a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer who draws inspiration from ancient weaponry, weathered surfaces, and religious and occult symbolism. She grew up deeply influenced by the dark history of New England, its abandoned graveyards and asylums as well as the Salem witch trials. Her designs have a sculptural, textured, rugged quality, the feel of twisted wood, rock, of the veins of the earth.

Witchy, tortuous, and intensely beautiful, her metalcraft is instantly recognizable and powerful. It combines the delicacy of gems and precious stones with sharp lines and textures with a deft alchemy, creating a simultaneously fragile and bold style. She has used teeth, horsehair, fossils, leather, likewise garnet and moonstone, opal and pearl, to give her jewels their distinct molding and touches. Her pieces are instruments of protection, both armor and sorcery, investing the wearer with a talismanic power. They are a blend of the natural and the supernatural, and explore the borders or shared realm between good and evil, beauty and nightmare.

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Thrjár, from the Icelandic for the feminine plural nominative of “three,” is the jewelry line of Daria Andreson, inspired by her love of nature and her lifelong fascination by Norse culture. Mythical, organic, runic, and rough, these raw and lovely pieces are like sigils or talismans of a primeval heathen world, bedecked with mists, hidden by dark forests, and alive with mystery.

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These breathtakingly gorgeous, splendid, and elaborate costumes by Polish designer Agnieszka Osipa seem to breathe the aura of a hallucinatory world, a dreamland, a mysterious and ethereal kingdom of myths, witches, queens, and fantastical creatures, shrouded in mists, deliriously beautiful and occult.

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Kirsty Mitchell’s Wonderland Book is an enormous volume containing over 600 photographs, featuring the seventy-four pieces in her Wonderland series. It is a labor of love created in memory of her mother, who died from cancer in 2008, and took over five years to complete. These otherworldly images, lush, extravagant, super saturated with color, feature Mitchell’s lavish, wildly imaginative costumes and embody a fantastical, whimsical, and unrestrainedly vibrant fairytale aesthetic, inspired by the storybooks her mother read to her as a child and by her personal journey of grief and transfiguration.

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Velvit is a concept store and online gallery which curates collections of fashion, art, and music by independent artists and designers. Thus far they have included fashion/jewelry labels Ovate, Noctex, Raw Taste, and Maude Nibelungen, artist Jas Helena, and musician Lykanthea.

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Having previously posted about the “Spider Dress” prototype, I was delighted by the unveiling of the finished design last week. Pearl-colored, reminiscent of Iris van Herpen‘s 3D-printed couture creations, this gorgeous dress by Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht is a marvel of fashiontech (the intersection of fashion and technology). The animatronic garment is inspired by animal behavior, using motion and respiration sensors to respond to the approach of others – “The dress measures the wearer’s stress levels with wireless biosignals, and aggregates this information with measurements of others’ proximity and speed of approach (it can detect movement up to 22 feet away). The dress changes according to these various data inputs, gauging how the wearer is feeling about the people around her.”